Japanese resilient, even as the gods laugh

By Lewis M. Simons

We were deep in predawn sleep on the tatami mats when the floor began rocking and rolling. A low growl, something like a train rocketing toward us, but still at a great distance, rumbled into the bedroom. My wife and I instinctively grabbed for each other's hands. We froze, too terrified to utter a word.

AP file photo

16 years ago: A magnitude 7.2 quake near Kobe, Japan, killed 6,400 people in 1995.

16 years ago: A magnitude 7.2 quake near Kobe, Japan, killed 6,400 people in 1995.

It was Jan. 17, 1995, and according to the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock, a quarter to 6 in the morning. Our fifth-story apartment in Tokyo's Omotesando neighborhood bucked and swayed.

Moments later, we switched on the TV, and a reporter standing shakily in a studio that was swaying far more dramatically than our bedroom reported that an earthquake rated at a magnitude of 7.2 had just struck near the port city of Kobe, 267 miles southwest of Tokyo.

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After filing a story to my editors in the U.S., I spent the next 14 hours on every kind of transport I could find to get there. I was not prepared for what I found.

Having lived in Japan for 12 years by then, I had observed and participated in dozens of earthquake drills. These included clambering aboard special trailer-trucks, rigged to resemble house or office interiors, which were then set to shaking at increasing intensities. We had screwed our bookcases to the walls, learned to stand in door frames and maintained emergency kits of canned water, dried food and flashlights in the front hall closet.

We accepted that we, like our Japanese friends and neighbors, knew just what to do and not do when The Big One struck.

Another 'Big One'

Images of that long, exhausting journey flooded my memory with the first news that a far more powerful earthquake had struck Japan last Friday. History, it seemed, was about to repeat itself — despite Japan's conscientious efforts to always be prepared for the worst.

In 1995, when I reached Kobe, people in the streets were paralyzed with fear. The first neighborhood I reached on foot was little more than a mound of dust. The traditional houses made of mud and chopped straw with tile roofs had instantly collapsed, burying the sleeping occupants.

Over the course of the week I spent in Kobe, rattled again and again, day and night, by powerful aftershocks, it became clear that vast numbers of residents had no idea what to do. In all, about 6,400 were killed and 26,000 were injured. While newer buildings, such as the 20-story apartment tower where I camped on a friend's floor — fitted with hydraulic footings and rubberized seams — survived with little damage, 200,000 structures crumbled into deathtraps. Some 300,000 people were left homeless, and many remained in government-provided tent and trailer camps for as much as a year.

Despite Japan's vaunted reputation back then as "No. 1," many of its buildings were relics of its pre- or immediately post-World War II era of deprivation. A half-mile elevated stretch of the Hanshin Expressway, opened in 1962 and celebrated as quakeproof, toppled over like part of a child's Erector Set. Of 150 wharves in Kobe harbor, only 33 remained usable.

But the Japanese are nothing if not resilient. These are people who dragged themselves out of the utter devastation of the world's only two atomic bombings and the possibly even more horrific Tokyo fire-bombings to build in half a century one of the world's mightiest economies.

In the aftermath of Kobe, they once again set about rebuilding. The government, already beset by economic hardship, pumped billions into new and improved infrastructure. Authorities tightened already stringent building codes and requirements; increased public quake and tsunami drills; threw up 40-foot-tall seafront barriers to hold back the crashing waves generated by subterranean eruptions; and added more anti-meltdown technology to their nuclear power grid.

The emphasis was placed heavily on effectiveness, ignoring anything as mundane as attractive design. Japanese, over the millennia victimized by earthquakes, floods and fires, have historically striven to control and define nature. Riverbeds and hillsides are encased in concrete; beaches are scattered with concrete wave breakers; even forests are pruned and snipped into garden-settings of bamboo and moss.

The best plans ... in tatters

But as the Japanese know perhaps better than others, while man plans the gods laugh. Last Friday, the deities must have been uproarious. Even towering sea walls proved insufficient to withstand the tsunami that thundered ashore at Sendai and other northern coastal towns and cities. Entire communities floated away, washed off their foundations by the pounding water. By Tuesday, 6,000 people had been confirmed dead or missing, with officials estimating that at least 10,000 citizens were killed. Most frightening, particularly to the world's only nuclear-weapons victims, is the as-yet unknowable outcome of the nuclear power failures.

The cost of rebuilding this time is so far pegged at $180 billion. That it will turn out to be much more is a given. But rebuild the people of Japan will. Stoically, quietly, courageously, they will start over.

Confined to a cluster of islands about the size of California, the 127 million Japanese know they have no choice. They know, too, that however hard they work, however much they spend, one day another catastrophe will strike them. And however much they will have prepared, it once again might not be enough.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lewis M. Simons was based in Japan for 14 years.

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